The Killer Next Door (20 page)

Cher gulps. Yes, with my sprained ankle and my bruised ribs and my face that’ll split open if I strain, sure. Any time. She bends, obediently, and takes hold of the plastic. Got to find a way. Get through tonight, take some pills, get some sleep. How can it get worse, anyway?

Thomas bends, and rolls the Landlord on to his back. A long, dank strand of comb-over has come loose and wraps itself around the puffy neck. Thomas picks it up between his fingers and strokes it back into place, the gesture almost tender, the first moment of care anyone has shown for Roy Preece’s dignity. No funeral-parlour niceties for him. No embalming fluid or lilies, no church candles discreetly burning to cover the smell of formaldehyde.

Cher remembers her nanna, in her coffin with its polyester-satin lining, her best shirt dress buttoned up to the neck and her mouth turned up at the corners, the marks on her face miraculously disguised by the skill of the cosmetician. And Cher standing there, flanked by two social workers as though she might make a break for it, and all the old people popping in and telling her how her nanna used to talk about her all the time at the pensioners’ club, sucking their Werther’s Originals and treating it like a day trip. Suddenly, she wants to cry, to howl at the moon,
My nanna’s dead and there
’
s nobody left to love me
. She bites fiercely at her lower lip and forces her face to imitate the frozen impassivity she sees around her. Only kids cry, she thinks. Only stupid little kids. You’re with the grown-ups, now.

Thomas takes hold of a corner of the sheet and pulls it across the Landlord’s body to hide the slack, staring face. The action seems to spur them all into life. They leap forward and pull it fully across, tuck it in like a sleeping bag. Thomas and Hossein take the other side and pull it back towards her, and suddenly he’s not the Landlord any more. He’s no longer leering Roy Preece with his roguish lip twitches and his way of hitching his trousers up that seemed at once both pathetic and obscene. Now he’s just a hulking bundle of dirty blue plastic, a nuisance in the garden, a problem to be solved.

‘He’s still filthy,’ says Hossein, tiredness making his accent stronger so the word comes out as
feelthy
. ‘We can’t put him back like that.’

Thomas rubs his hands together, almost gleefully. ‘I’ll get up to the tool hire place tomorrow,’ he says, ‘and hire a power jet. Once we’ve got these drains unblocked, we can get it all cleared up. We can just turn the hose on the lot of it, give him a change of clothes and no one will be any the wiser. Come on. Time’s wasting.’

Hossein looks doubtful, but takes his corner. ‘Remember to bend at the knees,’ says Thomas. ‘The last thing we need is someone putting their back out.’

They shuffle around the corpse, trying to work out the best way to carry it. Settle, in the end, for Thomas taking the feet and Hossein and Cher sharing the top end. Thomas counts down: three… two… one… and they straighten up together. Cher gasps at the sheer weight of him, at the pain shooting up through her foot. He’s a forklift truck, a reinforced ambulance, a supersized operating table. He’s not a man, she thinks, and feels her junk-fed muscles strain under her share, the sweat spring to her scalp like someone’s turned on a tap. There’s something else in there, there’s got to be. A whale. A load of cement. But she sees a jellyfish hand creep out from the fold in the plastic, and knows it isn’t true.

It seems to take an hour to get up the steps to the garden. Though they strain at the plastic, they can’t stop the heavy middle section from drooping, and it catches on each edge as they pass it. Her teeth grind against each other as she struggles to control the pain, and a protest from her cracked tooth at least distracts her from the howls of rage coming from her leg. They stop three times and rest their package on the bricks while they pant and flex their backs. She understands now what they mean by the phrase dead weight. Even Roy Preece can’t have been this heavy when he was breathing. She greys out a couple of times, aware of nothing but the deep crimson agony in the central core of her being, but eventually, though she has long since lost track of her surroundings, she realises that her flip-flops are on soft cool grass, and they are out in the open.

‘Keep going,’ Thomas urges, his whisper urgent. There’s no chance of secrecy now, of pretending they’re not there. A casual insomniac glancing out through their curtains will know exactly what they’re doing. ‘Hurry. Not much further. Come on.’

She limps forward. Her foot seems to have given up, decided that complaining is pointless, died down to a deep pulsating ache that she knows promises trouble for tomorrow. They’re able to let out a bit of slack in their screaming arms now they’re on the flat. They shuffle awkwardly between Vesta’s pots, then hobble crabwise across the uncut grass, feet catching, balance uncertain. What must we look like, she wonders, out here in the dark. But she knows the answer, and doesn’t ask the question again.

The shed approaches. Twenty feet… ten… five… She can hear her pulse in her ears, feels sure that the veins are sticking out of her skin like tree roots. Tendons stand out like hawsers in Hossein’s neck. Thomas looks like he’s going to burst. They reach the open door, and relief floods through her. Thomas backs in to the darkness. We’re nearly there. We’re nearly —

He sticks. The door’s too narrow. Roy’s life of chocolate and sausage rolls and late-night pizza has rendered him too wide to fit.

‘Shit,’ hisses Cher, and drops her corner. There’s a noise inside the shed – a tumbling, thumping noise – and she realises that Thomas, caught unawares by the sudden halt, has lost his grip and fallen over.

‘No,’ says Cher. ‘Not now,
fuck’s sake
.’

She hears him grunt and pull himself up, then the pulling starts from the other side again. Cher and Hossein brace themselves, and push. Their burden just bunches up against the frame, gets thicker, lodges the wood more deeply into itself.

‘Stop.’ Thomas’s voice sounds horribly loud on the night air. They suck their breath in and halt. Wait for the sound of sirens. Someone must have heard them by now. Come to their bedroom window to see what the neighbours are up to. She stares around, looks up at the Poshes’ hundred-pound roller blinds, but nothing stirs in the gardens, no faces appear at the windows.

He speaks again,
sotto voce
. ‘Turn him on his side.’

Don’t see how that will help, thinks Cher, but they obey. The body still sticks, like a cork in a bottle. But it’s soft tissue, without the underlying hardness of hip bones.

‘Tuck him in,’ comes the voice.

‘
What
?’

‘Tuck him in. Go on.’

Oh, God. She looks at Hossein and he looks back. He’s on the far side from the pendulous stomach. He can reach across and pull, but it’s going to be her job to tuck. She gulps. I’m fifteen, she thinks again. It’s all downhill from here.

He’s over halfway in, his stomach forced up towards his nipples by the pressure of the door frame. Cher balls her hands into fists, closes her eyes and presses. She’s never kneaded bread, but she thinks it might be a similar sensation.

The Poshes next door are throwing a party. At two o’clock in the afternoon, while Hossein is flushing out the drains with the power jet that Thomas, true to his word, hired from HSS, the sound of plummy merriment begins to float over the fence, and the air fills with a tantalising scent of a Saturday barbecue. The street fills up with SUVs, and Thomas’s rusty old Honda stands out like a bungalow in an executive development.

Hossein can’t believe that anyone would want to eat among the stench his labours are producing. But the English, he finds, are an odd race, prepared to put up with just about anything rather than engage with a stranger. It was one of many things about this grim grey city that depressed and confused him when he first came here. It took him a long time to learn not to take it personally. But he’s used to it now, and he can see its advantages. Certainly, it gives him some confidence that their plans for Roy Preece’s remains could see success, at least for a while. The Landlord’s neighbours will probably tut and spray Febreze around for months to avoid ringing on his doorbell and potentially having to deal with rudeness.

He bends back to his work. Everything they plan to do depends, ultimately, on getting these drains to work. They need to clean Roy up, get him pristine for his clean clothes, make sure he doesn’t contaminate his final destination. And the only way they can do that is by making sure that the place where they wash him is itself clean. And after that, if they are to carry on living here, business as usual but no rent to pay while, one by one they gradually melt away among the teeming masses…

Hossein is an economist by training, a troublemaker by reputation. He’s always prided himself on his competence. But sitting at a computer and marching with the Green Movement have done little to prepare him for the competencies he’s had to learn since he came to London. With a landlord like Roy, whose combination of meanness and inertia have meant that no repairs would get done unless one did them oneself, he’s had to become a carpenter-plumber-locksmith-glazier just to survive. And now, it seems, he is a drain clearance specialist.

He wonders what Roshana would make of him now, squatting over a manhole with a hose in his hand, waiting for some sign that something might happen. She used to tease him about the way he rolled up his sleeves and assumed an air of manly competence, which was pretty well non-existent. There were times he resented it – but he would give anything to have it back now. Her beautiful hands, her swift rejoinders, her courage, the way she railed against restriction. He tries not to think too much about her, for when he does, he feels as though the loneliness will overwhelm him.

He would be the first to admit that drains are not his area of expertise, but even so this blockage seems quite bizarre. The stuff he saw when he opened the manhole cover seemed to be at odds with the pool of blackened sewage he had been expecting. Sure, there’s sewage there, but it’s greasy, as though it’s been mixed with a gallon or two of cooking oil, and the greater part of the chamber seems to be stiff with something that looks unpleasantly like lard. Though there are six people living in this house, all cooking in their tiny kitchens, he finds it hard to believe that even all that could produce this much fat. I must talk to them all, once it’s clear, he thinks. They probably don’t know about fat: the way it hardens and turns to something that almost looks like stone once it’s coating the walls of a sewer. He only knows himself because he went down, as a cub reporter, into the bowels of the city with a team of sewer workers to see for himself, watched them scrape the stuff off the walls like barnacles off the underside of a boat.

‘That’s weird.’

He looks up and finds Collette standing in the kitchen doorway.

‘It looks strange to you?’

‘Yeah,’ says Collette. ‘Is that fat? It looks like fat.’

‘I think so.’

‘Is it moving?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like it.’

‘Careful, you don’t want to get a blowback.’

‘Thanks,’ he replies sarcastically. ‘I’ll do my best.’

A burst of laughter from next door; men and women together, talking in confident, ringing tones. The expensively educated in this country seem to have different voices, he’s noticed. Not just the accent: the actual tone. It’s as though money gives you extra lung power, the women’s voices deeper, the men sounding as though their throats begin somewhere deep in their abdomens.

‘Sounds like
someone’s
having a good time, anyway,’ says Collette.

Hossein looks at her. He knows they’re thinking the same thing. This wasn’t an event they had factored into the plan.

‘It’s okay,’ says Collette, uncertainly. ‘They’ll be done by teatime.’

‘Here’s hoping,’ says Hossein, and bends back to his work.

Deep beneath the earth, something gives. He feels it through his hands: a jerk in the hose, then a slight softening of its rigid hardness. The visible part of the chamber empties, suddenly and swiftly, as though a giant mouth had sucked on the other end. Around the sides, the fat still clings, greyish-white and granular.

‘Yes!’ says Collette. ‘Is that it?’

‘Looks like it,’ says Hossein.

‘Thank Christ for that.’

‘I think I’ll keep this thing running for a bit,’ says Hossein. ‘If this stuff’s all the way down to the sewer, I think we need to get as much of it off the sides as we can.’

‘What
is
that?’ She comes over and squats beside him, looks disgustedly down at the sludge. He’s suddenly, acutely aware of her proximity, the soft roundness of her bare shoulder in her sundress, the smooth curve of her neck, the golden curls tumbling around her ears. She smells good: like freshly ironed linen and baking bread. He feels himself blush, and turns his gaze studiously back to the drain. ‘Where’s it come from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It doesn’t look like anything I’ve… we should dig it out, you know. We can’t just leave it there. It’ll just gum everything up again.’

Hossein feels an urge to hurl. The fat looks evil, somehow. Unnatural. And now that the liquid sewage has drained away, he feels even less inclined to touch it. But he knows that Collette is right. There is an old plastic bucket in the corner of the area, covered in paint. If he uses the ladle from Vesta’s kitchen, it will probably work as a receptacle. They can dump it at the end of the garden. Dig a hole, if they have the strength left.

‘Where’s everyone else?’ asks Collette.

‘Cher’s with Vesta in the garden – and I think Gerard Bright is back in his room. I heard him coming in this morning. Thomas, I don’t know.’

‘How’s Vesta doing?’

Hossein shrugs. ‘As you would expect, I suppose.’

‘Yeah.’ She scratches the back of her neck and stares uncomfortably at the drain. ‘I’ll get the bucket,’ she says.

‘Oh, no,’ says Hossein. ‘It’s okay. I’ve got this.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ says Collette, and gives him a sweet, sunshiney smile.

He gives the hose another push, and finds that he can feed another three feet into the drain.

With all the water flying around in the shade, Hossein and Collette have no idea how hot the day has become. Sitting out in the sun is like being
on
a barbecue. The shed must be as hot as an oven inside, its contents baking like a slow pot roast. Vesta and Cher sit on the deckchairs, their backs turned firmly to the light, their eyes closed, in silence. Vesta looks old. It’s as though she’s aged a decade overnight, deep lines etched around her mouth, her skin grey and toneless, despite the long, long summer.

Cher has covered her eyes with a pair of giant panda sunglasses, but the bruise on her face is still visible around the edges, beginning to turn green as it develops. Her lip has scabbed over and looks worse than it did when Thomas brought her home. She’s a skinny little thing; looks like a baby bird in her sprigged cotton sundress, and her platform wedges. Neither of them stirs, but nor are they asleep.

The party is warming up over the fence, in as much as a British middle-class party ever warms up, the sound of glass clinking and confident voices ringing out in the hot air. The women’s laughter sounds like church bells. If they knew, thinks Vesta, what’s lying there on that concrete floor just yards away from them, they wouldn’t sound so sure of their place in the world. It must be great, living in a world where nothing’s ever undermined your self-belief. Where pension funds and mortgages figure because you think you’re going to live to ninety. Where your prospect for the night involves tipsy, sunburnt sleep and the worst thing that can happen to you is feeling jaded as you start the week, rather than creeping your way through darkened streets with a corpse in the boot of a car.

The sunlight has that strange yellow-gold tinge you only find in cities. Pollution, presumably, but it’s a pleasurable thing to look at through half-closed eyes. Vesta turns her head and soaks up the rays. Hears the power jet’s engine cut out, and its hum be replaced by the sound of rhythmical scraping. Oh, dear, she thinks. I know I should help him, but I can’t do it. People look at me and think I can handle anything, they always have, but they’re wrong.

Now the engine sound is gone, she can hear the conversations next door with greater clarity. A woman is telling a long, boring story about a trip to an all-inclusive resort hotel in Thailand. ‘Gaad, it was gorgeous. Premium-brand spirits and food all day. We didn’t really leave the pool, except to eat. And we had a waterfall in our room! Imagine! Your own waterfall!’

‘Did you go on any trips?’

‘There was a trip to an elephant sanctuary. We went on that, but we didn’t feel like anything much other than sleeping and sunbathing.’

‘Well, one works so hard. Sometimes I’d just give anything for a rest.’

‘I know. Exactly! And really, when you’ve got it all laid on like that, there doesn’t seem much point bothering with doing the tourist thing, really, does there?’

‘Not even shopping?’

‘Oh, yes,
obviously
shopping!’

The food smells amazing. Fragrant and clean and fresh, as if it’s come straight off the farm. Vesta’s mouth waters as gusts of savoury spice wafts over the fence and fill her nostrils. So funny how the world has changed. I grew up on roly-poly pudding, in a world where parsley sauce was regarded as exotic; and horseradish with your Sunday beef, if you had it. Mum and Dad would practically wrap wet towels round their faces when the Asians moved into the street and the gardens smelled of curry, but it always smelled like adventures to me. I still remember the first time I tasted jerk chicken. I thought I’d gone to heaven. So funny. Once upon a time, smells like those coming over the fence right now were smells you only smelled on the bottom rungs of society. And now they’ve brought it all back here with them and their giant people carriers. They could no more cook without garlic than they could without salt.

I wonder, she thinks, how I shall see this day, when I look back on it? The surreality of it, the enforced inaction, all of us waiting for darkness to fall. Is this how everyone feels, when they’ve killed someone? Not jittery, not afraid, not sorrowful, but numb?

In his attic eyrie, Thomas stands by the window and watches the
va-et-vient
below. Next door is having a party, and he has a great view from his attic dormer: children dressed in the sort of cotton pinafores and coloured dungarees you see in the catalogues that fall out of the
Sunday Times
stomp around in an inflatable paddling pool and bounce in a netted trampoline while adults stand about pouring white wine from a collection of bottles stored in an old enamel washtub full of ice. Every person in the garden has a cardigan tied round their shoulders, as though they’ve been handed it like a name badge as they came through the door. It’s a form of uniform, of course, no less recognisable than baseball caps or hoodies. It lets them know who to smile at in the street, who to ask for directions, who to cross the road to get away from. Half a dozen identical cocker spaniels pant in the shade of a pear tree.

He feels surprisingly relieved at the way things have turned out. There’s a tension about what they have to do tonight, but, if all goes well, Vesta Collins has done him a favour. The others may be confused by the blockage in the drains, but he knew what it was the moment he set eyes on it. And if the Landlord had done as the silly old woman kept asking, and called a professional cleaning outfit, they would likely have guessed what it was as well. It wouldn’t be the first time in London’s recent history, after all, that drains got blocked by subcutaneous fat.

I’ve been careless, he thinks. Stupidly, arrogantly careless, thinking that because my natron did such a good job of dissolving the stuff that it would carry it all the way to the sewers. Thinking that, because nowadays you can buy a blender for less than the price of a curry, you could just pour those entrails down the toilet, cup by cup. Sixty per cent of the brain alone is made of fat. Where did I think it was going to go?

He needs a new plan – this much is evident. When he realised that Roy Preece was dead and police would soon be swarming over the house, he’d nearly died of fright. If he’d had less presence of mind, if he’d been less able to think on the spot and see his way forward, he would have bolted from that kitchen, from that frightful body and the idiot neighbours lolling about waiting for someone to tell them what to do, fled upstairs and tried to hide his girls. Now Alice is gone, there is room in the bed for both of them, and that’s good, but the flat is full of equipment for which he’s never bothered to work out proper storage places, and even he, inured as he is to the smell by living in such proximity with it, knows that the place still carries olfactory reminders of Nikki’s dissolution in its very fabric. I can’t leave myself vulnerable like this, he thinks. I’ve been a fool.

He stands on tiptoe and leans from the window to snatch a view of the patio. The Iranian man, Hossein, seems to be finished with the power jet, and is scooping the remaining contents of the drain trap into a bucket. He has found a piece of cloth and tied it round his face like a bandit in a cowboy movie. His movements are deliberate, methodical. From what Thomas knows of his history, he’s a man well versed in keeping secrets when secrets need to be kept. Thomas does a web search on all of his neighbours as they move in, just to be sure, and is rarely surprised by what he finds. But Hossein Zanjani is clearly not a popular man, at least with the current regime in Iran. Unpopular enough, indeed, to have his own listing on the Amnesty website. He’s not worried that this will jeopardise his asylum application: he just doesn’t want the people with knives, or guns, or poison umbrellas, or whatever’s fashionable with the mullahs this year, to know where to track him down. He’s interesting, thinks Thomas, a man of principle. In other circumstances, he would probably never have gone along with this, but even a popular hero can be turned when he’s staring down the barrel of an AK47.